The Internet and the World Wide Web (“Web”) have changed the landscape of information delivery and affected numerous aspects of life. One benefit of this technological development is the ability to conduct business transactions globally via the Internet. As the volume of commerce conducted over the network continues to increase, collections of business units or organizations are working together to pool resources and expertise in order to achieve a common business objective. Organizations are sharing services and resources across enterprise boundaries in order to undertake collaborative projects and offer services that could not be provided by individual organizations.
However, with the adoption of online collaboration, organizations increasingly expose their internal applications and processes. Increasingly, the boundary between homogeneously administered, trusted private networks and the uncontrollable and insecure public networks is blurred. Indeed, traditional security measures which are often based on access control are no longer sufficient in a dynamic collaborative environment.
Reputation-based systems and other trust management based approaches have emerged as a method for stimulating adherence to electronic contracts and for fostering trust amongst strangers in a collaborative environment, such as in an business transaction based e-commerce environment. A reputation-based system gathers, distributes and aggregates trust and belief information as well as feedback about behavior and reliability of participants. Reputation mechanisms can provide an incentive for honest behavior and help people make decisions about who to trust. Past experience with participants can be projected into the future, giving a measure of their trustworthiness. Without such systems, where strangers are interacting in an online collaborative environment, the temptation to act deceptively for immediate gain could be more appealing than cooperation.
However, reputation-based systems still encounter significant challenges. Feedback can be deleted if a participant changes name. Indeed, a dishonest participant can use this to start fresh every time it builds up a bad reputation. People may not bother to provide feedback at all, negative feedback can be difficult to elicit and it is difficult to ensure that feedback is honest. Improvements in such a reputation-based system for online collaboration are needed.